The Dawn and the Day eBook

PREFACE.

When Humboldt first ascended the Andes and saw the
trees, shrubs and flora he had long before studied
on the Alps, he had only to look at his barometer,
or at the sea of mountains and hills below, the rocks
and soil around, and the sun above, to understand this
seeming marvel of creation; while those who knew less
of the laws of order and universal harmony might be
lost in conjectures about pollen floating in the upper
air, or seeds carried by birds across seas, forgetting
that preservation is perpetual creation, and that
it takes no more power to clothe a mountain just risen
from the sea in appropriate verdure than to renew
the beauty and the bloom of spring.

Max Mueller, who looks through antiquity with the
same clear vision with which Humboldt examined the
physical world, when he found the most ancient Hindoos
bowing in worship before Dyaus Pitar, the exact equivalent
of the Zeus Pater of the Greeks and the Jupiter of
the Romans, and of “Our Father who art in the
heavens” in our own divinely taught prayer,
instead of indulging in wild speculations about the
chance belief of some ancient chief or patriarch, transmitted
across continents and seas and even across the great
gulf that has always divided the Aryan from the Semitic
civilization and preserved through ages of darkness
and unbelief, saw in it the common yearning of the
human soul to find rest on a loving Father’s
almighty arm; yet when our oriental missionaries and
scholars found such fundamental truths of their own
religion as the common brotherhood of man, and that
love is the vital force of all religion, which consists
not in blood-oblations or in forms and creeds, but
in shunning evil and doing good, and that we must
overcome evil by good and hatred by love, and that
there is a spiritual world and life after death embodied
in the teachings of Buddha—­instead of finding
in this great fact new proof of the common Father’s
love for all His children, they immediately began to
indulge in conjectures as to how these truths might
have been derived from the early Christians who visited
the East, while those who were disposed to reject
the claims of Christianity have exhausted research
and conjecture to find something looking as if Christianity
itself might have been derived from the Buddhist missionaries
to Palestine and Egypt, both overlooking the remarkable
fact that it is only in fundamental truths that the
two religions agree, while in the dogmas, legends,
creeds and speculations which form the wall of separation
between them they are as wide asunder as the poles.

How comes it on the one theory that the Nestorians,
whose peculiar creed had already separated them from
the balance of the Christian church, taught their
Buddhist disciples no part of that creed to which
they have adhered with such tenacity through the ages?
And on the other theory, how comes it, if the Divine
Master was, as some modern writers claim, an Essene,
that is, a Buddhist monk, that there is not in all
his teachings a trace of the speculations and legends
which had already buried the fundamental truths of
Buddhism almost out of sight?